This was not my best year for reading. There was no shortage of great books; the shortage was in me: energy, attention, ability to tear my eyes away from the headlines. But here are a few outstanding books I enjoyed in 2025.

Read more: 2025 My Year in Books

FICTION

The Antidote by Karen Russell
Where do you place the things you don’t want to remember? If you live in the Great Plains of this dazzling novel, you confide them to a prairie witch—a woman who serves as a vault to hold a town’s secrets so everyone else can forget them. But one day at the height of the Dust Bowl in the farm town of Uz, Nebraska, a prairie witch called The Antidote awakens to find herself in jail and her soul empty of the secrets her clients paid her to contain. Toss in a ruinous drought, a brutal sheriff, and a serial killer on the loose, and you have a town that desperately needs a touch of magic or, even more rare, human kindness. The Antidote finds these in a teenage girl who’s a basketball whiz, a Black woman who’s photographing the Dust Bowl for FDR’s arts program, and a lonely farmer who curses his good fortune. The mix of actual historical events, magical elements, deep characterization, gorgeous, assured writing, and an astonishing true-life arc of erasure makes this a novel to think about long after you close the book.

Atmosphere: A Love Story by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Thoroughly entertaining novel about two women astronauts in the early 1980s who fall in love with each other. Joan and Vanessa are among a small coterie of women scientists, surgeons, and engineers who win spots in NASA’s second group of astronauts to include women and people of color. (The real-life Sally Ride was in the first group; until then, all astronauts had to be military pilots, a job closed to women.) Joan and Vanessa go through the thrill and rigors of astronaut training and then space flight—all the while knowing their slightest misstep could doom all future women astronaut candidates, and carrying out a cosmic love story in the crippling secrecy required by the times and their government jobs.

Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj
Imagine a mosaic made of beautiful pieces of colored glass, some of them chipped, and you have a sense of this novel. In nine chapters with alternating points of view, each of which works as a standalone short story, the author creates three interconnected Palestinian American families who live in and around Baltimore today. We meet the tough lawyer who is a hero to her clients and a failure to her mother; the dutiful son who escorts the body of his angry, estranged father back to a homeland the son has never visited; the fully American grandchildren, the homesick immigrant grandparents, and the generation stretched between them, all of them pulled by the gravity of their traditions and the demands of their new land. And then a young woman in a Palestinian village is murdered by her father and brothers, and this “honor killing” casts its long shadow all the way to Baltimore. (Recommended to me by Martha Toll)

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
This near-future novel is, unfortunately, a book for our time. Sara Hussein is a museum archivist, a mother, a wife, and an insomniac. She tries a brain implant to help her sleep; it works, but it harvests data from her dreams, and an AI algorithm concludes that she is at high risk for committing violence. In a chilling scene, she is detained at the airport—but is it because of her dreams? Her brown skin? The way she snapped at the TSA agents? Sara is sent to a detention center run by a private corporation that rents out the inmates’ labor, where she creates wary connections with other incarcerated women. No one knows what criteria determines when they can be released, and any tiny infraction of dress, demeanor, punctuality, even what or how they eat, can add time to their detention. As her incarceration lengthens, even Sara’s husband seems to lose interest in her. If she is ever to escape this netherworld, it will be up to her—but the elements that make Sara authentically “her” are the very ones the system uses to keep her locked up.

A Family Matter by Claire Lynch
Sad and lovely novel about a British family torn apart by the brutal homophobic laws of the 1980s (although it seems like the 1950s), through which lesbian mothers routinely lose custody of their children and are debased and humiliated by the courts. A young mother named Dawn falls in love with another woman and is denied all access to her beloved three-year-old daughter. The story is told from the point of view of Dawn, her husband, and their daughter—forty years later when the daughter is a mother herself and finally learns the truth about her own past. The brief sections that focus on the court case are particularly chilling, since the incredibly intrusive and insulting questions asked by the lawyers and judge are all taken from real trial transcripts of the era. A brief novel with a lingering sting.

Heartwood by Amity Gaige
A middle-aged woman who’s hiking the Appalachian Trail disappears, and two other women—an experienced game warden and a retired scientist—make it their mission to find her, one by leading an arduous backwoods search and one by following scientific clues. A gripping literary novel that creates mounting tension as it explores the tangled ties between mothers and daughters and among the people we choose to call family.

History Lessons by Zoe B. Wallbrook
Light-hearted mystery about a scholar of French history, in her first year teaching at a prestigious university, who receives an odd text from a colleague and later discovers he sent it moments before he was murdered. Daphne is used to being the only Black woman in white spaces and used to keeping secret the many strange skills she’s developed through her family’s profession, which appears to be espionage. She didn’t think she’d need those skills in the quiet academic life she’s built, but as she gets swept into solving her colleague’s murder, they just might save her life. The book had a little too much rom-com writing for my taste, but it was a fun distraction from real life.

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor
Delightful 1971 novel about a newly widowed woman, Mrs. Palfrey, who goes to live at a residential hotel for genteel old people in London. When she falls while out on a walk, Mrs. Palfrey is rescued by a young man named Ludo, who joins her in a gentle deception for the sake of her hotel-mates: that he is her devoted grandson. In fact, he is as lonely as she is, and the relationship bolsters them both. Mrs. Palfrey and the other Claremont residents have lived through both World Wars and the death of the British Empire, so observing the upheavals of the 1960s makes them feel even older than their years. The book is stuffed with sharply drawn characters, wrapped in a narrative that is tinged with mortality and often slyly funny. (Recommended to me by Kristin Ohlson)

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
This is the book I’ve recommended the most frequently this year. An Australian woman in her 60s who works at an environmental nonprofit goes to a week-long retreat at a convent in the rural area where she grew up. She’s not religious but her despair with the world is such that she goes back to Sydney, leaves her job and her marriage and returns to the convent for good. (There’s a scene in which she unsubscribes from all her newsletters, including several I subscribe to.) Her life at the convent is basic: cooking, cleaning, gardening, learning silence and humility. They are so isolated that the pandemic doesn’t shake them much. Their peace is disrupted by three arrivals: the bones of a former nun; a visit from another former nun who left the convent to become an activist superstar but in her childhood went to school with the protagonist and was mercilessly bullied; and a plague of mice that overruns the convent and all of Australia. (The mouse infestation actually happened.) It’s a joy to read a quiet novel in which adults grapple with questions about what constitutes a good life and what we owe to one another.

More Recommended Fiction

• 33 Place Brugmann by Alice Austen
• After Oz by Gordon McAlpine
• Bear by Julia Phillips
• The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
• The Boy in the Field by Margot Livesey
• Bug Hollow by Michelle Huneven
• Casualties of Truth by Lauren Francis-Sharma
• Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
• Culpability by Bruce Holsinger
• Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet
• Fallout by Jordan Rosenfeld
• Held by Anne Michaels
• How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
• Kills Well with Others by Deanna Raybourn
• Let Us Descend by Jesmyn West
• May the Wolf Die by Elizabeth Heider
• The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich
• Orbital: A Novel by Samantha Harvey
• Our Woman in Moscow by Beatriz Williams
• The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue
• Queens of Crime by Marie Benedict
• The Road from Belhaven by Margot Livesey
• The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
• Smoke Kings by Jahmal Mayfield
• So Big by Edna Ferber
• Swift River by Essie Chambers
• Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
• There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
• Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Nonfiction

Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry
I’ve never read anything by Imani Perry that I didn’t love, and this book is no exception. It’s a swirling, almost stream-of-consciousness exploration of the color blue and its many connections to Black history, culture, politics, creativity, and spirituality. Yes, you’ll find the musical genre of the blues examined in Perry’s intimate, erudite, and protean writing style, but also blue jeans, cobalt, blue skin, and forms of blueness you never noticed or whose meaning you never understood. Perry leads us on a journey into the heart and history of this most omnipresent color.

More Recommended Nonfiction

• 107 Days by Kamala Harris
• The Dragon from Chicago: The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany by Pamela Toler
• Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
• Is a River Alive? By Robert MacFarlane
• Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools that Built the Civil Rights Movement by Elaine Weiss

What’s Next?

In less than a week it will be a new year. An election year. A year when enticing new books will be published and older books will beckon from library and bookstore shelves. Got any suggestions for what should go on my To Be Read list?